RUTHFULLY YOURS

For half a century, the federal government has pursued a disastrous strategy in addressing the problems of black Americans. They were designated a victim class, and enormous sums of money were expended on incentives to perpetuate that status.

The welfare state has perpetuated multi-generational pathologies, while the encouragement of victimology and the blame placed on white racism have poisoned race relations instead of healing them.

It’s fair to say the United States government began its long and catastrophic commitment to this approach fifty years ago today (or yesterday): February 29, 1968. On that day, the Kerner Commission (officially the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders) delivered its report (official summary; full 400-plus pages), and white racism was officially blamed for the problems of black America.

White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.

In those days, I was already a political junkie who read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and a local paper and watched network news. I remember well the huge fuss the media made over the Kerner Commission Report. It kicked off an extended campaign that was often labeled a “national soul-searching.”

All the smart people you could find in the media pretty much agreed that we just had to commit ourselves to fighting racism as the solution to the problems of the black community. White guilt gained momentum as a force in individual and group decisions.

The effects of the report were far-reaching. The powerful institutions of America were put on notice that consciously or not, they were perpetuating racism:

Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget – is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.

Lately, the left has been spouting about unchallenged moral authority. Rep. Scalise is the closest thing to a sitting official with unchallenged moral authority on mass shootings. He was seriously wounded when a Bernie Sanders supporter opened fire at practice for a congressional charity baseball game. Instead of seizing on that, Rep. Scalise and other Republicans took the high ground.

Meanwhile after Parkland, the left went right back to its swamp.

I don’t expect the media or the left to listen to Rep. Scalise. But maybe this should be a reminder that decency doesn’t work with the indecent. Republicans should have treated the attack just like Parkland.

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., said Monday that lawmakers should be focused on addressing mental health to help stop future shootings like the one in Parkland, Fla., on Feb. 14 and the one last summer in which he was shot, before they focus on ways to take people’s guns away.

“Let’s focus more on addressing these problems in mental health that we’ve started to deal with in Congress,” Scalise said on Fox News. “Let’s close loopholes, let’s figure out what went wrong with government before people start talking about taking away the rights of law abiding citizens.”

That would be the right thing to do. There’s majority support for it. But the left is obsessed with dismantling the Bill of Rights instead.

The reactions to the Florida school shooting have been so predictable that most commentary starts with some variation of “here we go again.” The usual “solutions” to the problem are trotted out, each with its varying degrees of weakness, and none able to achieve what everybody expects––no more massacres of kids at school. But more interesting than this fossilized debate are the unspoken assumptions behind the various recommendations, and our culture’s inability to talk meaningfully about the most consequential phenomenon in history: human evil. That’s why it’s easier to ritually repeat the same failed decades-old “solutions,” or to politicize the bloodshed for partisan gain.

The left, of course, thinks “smarter” gun control is the answer. They want to ban “assault rifles,” a scare-term that confuses semiautomatic with automatic weapons, the sale of which is already strictly limited. Then they sell the bait-and-switch by highlighting sinister-looking add-ons like silencers or high-capacity magazines. But if anti-gun nuts were concerned with gun deaths rather than the relatively rare but more politically fungible multiple-victim school-shootings, they’d know that very few murders involve rifles. In 2016, murderers were 19 times more likely to use handguns than rifles. And more murders were committed with hands and feet than with rifles. Demonizers of “assault rifles” forget that they were banned from 1994 to 2004, and that the ban was ineffective, failing to stop the Columbine shooters in 1999, or even to reduce firearm killings.

Other talking points are equally useless for anything other than partisan gain. Like the “assault rifle,” the NRA has become the bogeyman Dems reflexively trot out for a two-minute hate after every high-profile shooting. Politicians who gobble up billions of dollars from public employee unions and tech plutocrats condemn the comparative pittance the NRA spends in lobbying to defend a Constitutional right. Confiscation of guns, along the lines of Australia’s program a few years back, runs afoul of the Second Amendment, not to mention being practically impossible given that there are about 300 million guns in circulation, five million of which are the dreaded AR-15 “assault rifles.”

Former president Obama actually said the following at his secret MIT speech, according to the transcript obtained by Reason magazine: “We didn’t have a scandal that embarrassed us. I know that seems like a low bar.”

It seems as though Obama set a tremendously high bar as to what would embarrass him.

It should have been embarrassing to Obama and his supporters when:

He continually lied by saying you could keep your doctor and your health plan and that premiums would go down when Obamacare passed.

He had a gun-running operation called Fast and Furious, where the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives lost track of over 2,000 guns it allowed to be sold to Mexican drug cartels and people died. Obama claimed he had no idea about the project but claimed executive privilege to hide documents.

His IRS targeted political opponents, violating their free speech and freedom of association rights granted by the Constitution.

He sicced his Justice Department goons on the Little Sisters of the Poor, suing them for daring to believe they had religious freedom.

Planned Parenthood personnel were caught bragging that they crunched and crushed babies for profit. Somehow, Obama, the media, and other Democrats didn’t have any empathy for the babies and weren’t embarrassed at all about this appalling practice. Nor did they do anything to hold Planned Parenthood accountable, ignoring the law.

He left people to die in Libya while he and Hillary concocted a lie to protect their political power. He even lied to the families of those who died and had Susan Rice continually lie to the public, showing that he and Hillary have zero empathy for those who died and their families. His minions arrested and imprisoned a man they knowingly falsely blamed for an anti-Mohammed video. And people say Trump has no empathy and doesn’t discharge his duties as president.

My column that posted last night is an in-depth analysis of the Schiff memo, the response of House Intelligence Committee Democrats to the Nunes memo published by committee Republicans. I offer a variety of reasons why the response principally proffered by the committee’s ranking member, Representative Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), fails to defend the issuance of FISA court surveillance warrants against an American citizen tied to the Trump campaign, Carter Page, in a counterintelligence investigation seeking to probe suspected ties between Donald Trump and Russia. The warrant was issued based on uncorroborated hearsay allegations from unknown sources, compiled in the so-called Steele dossier. The FBI and Justice Department failed to disclose that these allegations were generated by an opposition-research project commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

As I argue in the column, the Schiff memo leaves no doubt that the key allegation supporting issuance of the warrant is the Steele dossier’s claim that, while on a well-publicized trip to Moscow in July 2016, Page met with two top Putin regime operatives, Igor Sechin and Igor Divyekin. Page credibly denies the meetings; former British spy Christoper Steele’s claim that they happened is based on unidentified hearsay sources that he concedes he never confirmed; and all indications are that the FBI never corroborated them. In congressional testimony, Former FBI director James Comey described the dossier’s allegations about Donald Trump as “salacious and unverified.” Furthermore, according to a memo published by two senior Senate Judiciary Committee members — Chairman Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) — then-director Comey conceded that the Bureau did not corroborate Steele’s sources and relied on the fact that Steele had given the FBI reliable information in the past. (See Grassley-Graham memo, p.2.)

At the Washington Examiner, Byron York picks up on something I wish I had highlighted: The Schiff memo’s focus on past Russian intelligence efforts (in 2013) to recruit Page to become an agent for Russia. As Byron notes, the Schiff memo claims that “Steele’s information about Page was consistent with the FBI’s assessment of Russian intelligence efforts to recruit him and his connections to Russian persons of interest.”

The fact that a foreign power is trying to recruit an American to become an agent for that foreign power is not a sufficient basis to issue a surveillance warrant against the American under FISA. It would, of course, be sufficient to issue a warrant against the foreign spies who are making the recruitment efforts, but it is not enough for a warrant against the American citizen who is the target of the recruitment effort.

Readers of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit will recall the philosopher’s withering comments about “the dogmatism of mere assertion” which yields naught but an empty and deceptive feeling: self-certitude.

I thought about Hegel’s comments this morning when looking through the Democrats’ attempted rebuttal of the memo released earlier this month by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee.

It is interesting to compare the two memos, both as rhetorical artifacts and as substantive contributions to the debate over possible “Russian collusion” in the 2016 presidential election. Even a comparison of their physical appearance is revealing. Let’s start there.

The Republicans’ memo, overseen by Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is a four-and-a-half-page précis of findings from an ongoing oversight investigation into the behavior of the FBI and Department of Justice during the 2016 election cycle. It is prefaced by a brief letter from presidential counsel Donald McGahn to Congressman Nunes laying out the rationale for declassifying the memo and releasing it to the public. Each page of the memo is marked “UNCLASSIFIED” and the legend “TOP SECRET NOFORN” (for “no foreign nationals”) on each page is struck through with a heavy black stroke. Otherwise it is clean.

The Democrats’ memo, overseen by ranking minority member Adam Schiff, spills on to a tenth page. It is probably only about a half again as long as the Republicans’ memo, however, because—in addition to bearing the “Unclassified” stamps and strike-throughs of the “top secret” advisories—its text is littered with redactions: many passages of the text are blotted out. Were those redactions required by the FBI? By the executive branch? It was not said. Nor was it said why the Democrats did not take the redactions on board and present a clean text. I do not know the answer. My suspicion is that they wanted the blocks of black to stand as mute, non-specific but nonetheless graphically incriminating witnesses to their allegations.

For example, much of the memo deals with Carter Page, the American businessman who briefly served as a volunteer foreign policy advisor for the Trump campaign. In a section of the memo headed “Page’s Connections to Russian Government and Intelligence Officials” we encounter the following: “As DOJ described in detail to the Court, Page had an extensive record as”—as what? We don’t know. The juicy news is submerged beneath a minatory stroke of black.

Similarly, after informing us that a “Russian intelligence officer targeted Page for recruitment”—eyebrow raising, what?—we read that “Page showed”—another black stroke, starving knowledge but inflaming the imagination. What did Page show? Interest? Did he promise to smuggle the nuclear launch codes into Moscow? We don’t know. But we can think the worst.

Open the Books CEO Andrew Andrzejewski on the push for more transparency on federal government workers’ pay.

The government is keeping the salary information of more than 250,000 employees secret, according to Andrew Andrzejewski, the CEO of OpenTheBooks.com, a website that tracks government spending.

Over the past 11 years, OpenTheBooks has compiled the salaries and bonuses of 2 million federal government workers and posted them online by zip code.

But this year the government concealed the salaries of 255,000 employees, Andrzejewski said.

“It’s one in five federal bureaucrats,” Andrzejewski told Stuart Varney on FOX Business’ “Varney & Co.” “Their salaries are now redacted, and we estimate that the total payroll funded by the American taxpayer now hidden in the swamp is $20 billion.”

The House Democratic surveillance memo is out, and it should worry Americans who care about privacy and due process. The memo defends the conduct of the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation in obtaining a series of warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to wiretap former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The Democrats argue that Christopher Steele, the British former spy who compiled the Trump “dossier” on which the government’s initial warrant application was grounded, was credible. They also claim the FISA court had the information it needed about the dossier’s provenance. And they do not dispute former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s acknowledgment that the FBI would not have sought a FISA order without the Steele dossier.

The most troubling issue is that the surveillance orders were obtained by withholding critical information about Mr. Steele from the FISA court. The court was not informed that Mr. Steele was personally opposed to Mr. Trump’s election, that his efforts were funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, or that he was the source of media reports that the FBI said corroborated his dossier. These facts are essential to any judicial assessment of Mr. Steele’s veracity and the applications’ merits.

The FBI should have been especially wary of privately produced Russia-related dossiers. As the Washington Post and CNN reported in May 2017, Russian disinformation about Mrs. Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch evidently prompted former FBI Director James Comey to announce publicly the close of the investigation of the Clinton email server, for fear that the disinformation might be released and undermine the bureau’s credibility.

In addition, even assuming the dossier was accurate regarding Mr. Page, its allegations are thin. Mr. Page was said to have met in Moscow with Russian officials, who raised the potential for cooperation if Trump was elected; Mr. Page was noncommittal. The most significant claim—that those officials offered Mr. Page a bribe in the form of Russian business opportunities—suggests he was not a Russian agent. Existing operatives don’t need to be bribed.

There was no good reason to withhold from the FISA court any information regarding Mr. Steele, his anti-Trump biases, or the dossier’s origin as opposition research. The court operates in secret, so there was no danger of revealing intelligence sources and methods. The inescapable conclusion is that the information was withheld because the court would have been unlikely to issue the order if it knew the whole truth.

That’s a problem because following the rules and being absolutely candid with the court is even more essential in the FISA context than in ordinary criminal investigations. Congress enacted FISA in 1978 to create a judicial process through which counterintelligence surveillance could take place within the U.S., even when directed at American citizens, consistent with “this Nation’s commitment to privacy and individual rights.” CONTINUE AT SITE

My son Mark, whose mind is more capacious, objective and generous than mine, nicely formulated the Donald Trump problem for thoughtful conservatives. “I approve of almost everything he has done,” my son remarked, “and I disapprove of almost everything he has said.”

Second the motion. I approve of the Neil Gorsuch appointment, the moving of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the removal of often-strangling regulations from much commerce, the opening of the Keystone pipeline, the tax-reform law, and more.

I disapprove of the bragging tweets, the touchiness, the crude put-downs of anyone who disagrees with him (“Little Marco, ” “insecure Oprah, ” “Sloppy Steve, ” and the rest), the unrestrained vulgarity. America has had ignorant, corrupt, vain, lazy presidents before, but in Donald Trump we have the first president who is a genuine boor.

In many realms of life, a boor’s rude, unmannerly nature can be forgivable. A wise stockbroker, who makes his clients lots of money, might get away with being a boor. A boorish winning football coach— Mike Ditka, take a bow—is livable if not likable. Showbiz has never been without its boors, from George Jessel to Whoopi Goldberg. Even a boorish friend is possible, if he is also loyal, generous and honorable. But a boorish president of the United States presents a problem.

The presidency, like the monarchy in England, has a symbolic along with a practical aspect. The president is meant to represent the nation at its best. What precisely that means can vary greatly in a country as wide and differentiated as ours. Dwight David Eisenhower was a different model of our best than was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Harry S. Truman was different again, and yet in his own way he represented the country, in its Middle Western, small-business, common-sensical strain.

Democrats scramble to misdirect in defense of their own as the Nunes memo remains unrebutted.

On Saturday, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, released his memorandum in an attempt to rebut the Republican memorandum that HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) released on February 2.

As I wrote on February 5, the Nunes memo describes the FBI’s and the Department of Justice’s abuses of their law enforcement powers to spy on the Trump campaign and its advisors during and after the 2016 election.

The Schiff memo is cleverly written, making several assertions by which it attempts to confuse and misinform on the issues. It flails and fails in Schiff’s effort to discredit the principal findings of the Nunes memo.

The key points made by the Nunes memo are:

(1) that the FBI relied on the Steele dossier, a compilation of anti-Trump information that the FBI had not verified, and swore to its truth to obtain surveillance warrants on Carter Page, a one-time Trump campaign advisor; and

(2) that the FBI failed to inform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), from which the warrants were sought, that the Steele dossier was bought and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.